How to change compatibility level for a sharepoint site from 14 to 15

Question

I am upgrading from Sharepoint Server 2013 to Sharepoint 2016

The page

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/upgrade-and-update/overview-of-the-upgrade-process

says that

"SharePoint Server 2016 does not support SharePoint 2010 mode (that is, compatibility level 14) site collections. Any site collection that is in this mode will block the attachment of that content database to the SharePoint Server 2016 farm. You must upgrade all SharePoint 2010 mode sites to 2013 mode (that is, compatibility level 15) on the existing 2013 farm before you mount the database on the new SharePoint 2016 farm"

I have run the following powershell command:

to live all sites at level 14.

This has listed 3 sites at level 14 - 2 of which are of the format http://webapplicationURL/personal/{username}

and one http://webapplicationURL/mysites

(There are approx 100 sites listed that are at level 15 - all ok - so dont know why the 3 are still at level 14).

What is the process for changing the compatbility level of the three sites to level 15 ?

What will be the impact on the upgrade to sharepoint 2016 of not changing the compatbility level of these sites ?

Answer 1

Hi @Greg Booth,

The sites you list at level 14 are My sites.

• http://webapplicationURL/personal/{username}: personal site collection
• http://webapplicationURL/mysites: My Site Host site collection

To upgrade My sites to SharePoint2016, see this article: Upgrade My Sites to SharePoint Server 2016. In your case, you should make a little change in step 6 under Upgrade My Sites.

Set the compatibility range settings for site creation on the My Sites web application. Use MinCompatibilityLevel = 15 and MaxCompatibilityLevel= 15 for your compatibility range settings.

As per my knowledge, changing the compatibility level from 14 to 15 is impossible. So, you should use MinCompatibilityLevel = 14 and MaxCompatibilityLevel= 15 for your compatibility range settings. Then go on your upgrade steps.

---

If the answer is helpful, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote it. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.